Friends and Strangers

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “Yes, totally,” she said into the phone. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  Thank you, she mouthed to Sam, giving her the bills.

  Sam put on her coat and kissed Gil on the cheek. “Bye-bye,” she said, shaking his fat hand.

  She waved at Elisabeth, who, in turn, placed her palm over the cell phone’s receiver and whispered, “Are you coming for dinner on Sunday?”

  “I’d love that,” Sam whispered back.

  “Great. See you then.”

  Elisabeth raised her voice and resumed talking enthusiastically to whoever was on the other end of the line.

  * * *

  —

  When Sam was working, she let herself in each morning at Elisabeth’s request. But when she joined them for dinner, she rang the bell.

  That Sunday, Elisabeth answered the door with Gil in her arms.

  “He refuses to go down,” she said. “I hope he’s not getting sick.”

  “Poor peanut,” Sam said.

  “Guess who had his first solid food today?” Elisabeth said. “The pediatrician said to wait until he’s six months and, even then, just purees to start. But Andrew was eating a cracker, and Gil plucked it out of his hand and ate it, like he’d done it a million times. Can you believe that?”

  Sam thought of all the saltines she had seen him eat. Delmi was a mother of five, so sure of herself, that it had never occurred to Sam that Gil was too young.

  She had watched a child take his first steps while babysitting on a Friday night in high school, and never mentioned it to the parents.

  In London, she sometimes took the twins to the park and let them dig in the dark earth, against their mother’s wishes. They had no shovels to dig with, so she let them use silver soup spoons. At first, they freaked out when their hands got dirty, holding their palms up in alarm. Her last week before leaving, Tom found a slug in the dirt and dropped it into his mouth. Sam felt almost proud. She felt like Mary Poppins at the end of the movie. Her work here was done; she could float away.

  “A cracker!” was all she said now. “Aren’t you a big boy?”

  Elisabeth kissed Gil.

  “This one is an old soul, Sam. He knows things. I swear.”

  9

  Elisabeth

  HALLOWEEN FELL ON A FRIDAY.

  Elisabeth had never had trick-or-treaters before. It was the sort of thing she daydreamed about when she imagined owning a house. In a fit of excitement, she bought a dozen bags of candy two weeks in advance. She and Andrew had since devoured the contents of three of them.

  Now she stood, shaking what remained into two wooden salad bowls. She tossed the candy with her hands as Sam looked on from her seat at the kitchen island. Gil was in Sam’s lap, dressed as a mouse. Their neighbor Pam had offered Elisabeth the costume, a hand-me-down worn by her two kids. It was a one-piece gray fleece suit, with a tail and a hood that had oversize floppy pink ears sewed on. Elisabeth and Sam could not resist putting Gil in it first thing that morning, and adding black eyeliner whiskers to his cheeks.

  “We don’t want all the good candy on top, and the boring stuff at the bottom,” Elisabeth said now. “I’ve got to mix it so the kids see a variety of options.”

  “You don’t have any boring stuff,” Sam said. “I always wondered about those people who give out Raisinets. Do they, like, hate children?”

  In fifteen minutes, Sam would go home. Weekends now were the opposite of what they used to be—Elisabeth dreaded the days without Sam’s company, the long stretches with no childcare. She accomplished nothing on the weekends. The only part she looked forward to were Sunday nights, chatting with Sam on the sofa upstairs. Those were often the only real conversations she had all week. By the time Monday morning arrived, she practically threw Gil into Sam’s arms, starving for a bit of freedom.

  She told Nomi that this made her feel like a terrible mother.

  All mothers hate weekends, Nomi said. TGIM!

  Elisabeth’s phone buzzed on the counter. A text from Faye: Pic of G in his costume, please! Bad day over here—another letter from the bank about the house…Nana needs a pick-me-up.

  Elisabeth sent Faye a few of the roughly one hundred photos she’d taken earlier, pushing down the feeling that she was responsible for her mother-in-law’s predicament. She imagined Faye sending a message like that and wondering why Elisabeth didn’t just say, Let us help you.

  She flipped the phone over so she couldn’t see the screen.

  “What are you up to tonight?” she asked Sam.

  “Costume party at State. Isabella and I are going as those creepy twins from The Shining. But, like, a sexy version. Her idea.”

  “That sounds fun.”

  “Ehh, it’ll be like every other party, but with less clothing. I kind of hate Halloween. It’s such a sexist holiday.”

  “Hmm,” Elisabeth said. This had never occurred to her.

  Years ago, Andrew invited her to a Halloween party, their fourth or fifth date. They ended up sneaking off to the roof with a bottle of wine and talking. They lost track of time. When they finally came back downstairs, the party was over. The hosts had gone to bed.

  Tonight, he would probably insist on working once he got home. He was putting together an application for a conference in Denver, where, if chosen, he would get to present his invention to potential investors.

  Elisabeth would be alone with the baby, answering the door, smiling at all the witches and goblins and ghosts. She had been looking forward to it, but now it seemed depressing. Back in Brooklyn, Nomi was taking her kids to the Park Slope parade with friends, and then to a big group dinner at a new restaurant on Fourth Avenue.

  “Isabella is picking me up here at five,” Sam said. “We’re going to get our nails done. Or, I should say, she is. I’m tagging along because the place has free kombucha.”

  For an instant, Elisabeth felt hurt that they hadn’t invited her.

  She told herself to get a grip. She hadn’t slept more than two or three hours at a stretch for the last week. It made her thinking cloudy, her instincts strange.

  Just before five, the doorbell rang.

  Elisabeth felt a ridiculous surge of delight.

  “First customers,” she said.

  She went to the door with the candy. Sam followed, holding Gilbert.

  Sam’s roommate stood on the other side of the door, wearing flip-flops and jeans and a black peacoat.

  “Trick or treat,” she said. She reached into the bowl and pulled out a mini Snickers.

  “Isabella,” Sam said. “I told you to wait outside.”

  “I know, but I have to pee.”

  “Elisabeth, you remember Isabella,” Sam said.

  “Hi!” Isabella said. “Hey, do you mind if I use your bathroom real quick?”

  She seemed so comfortable in her skin. Elisabeth couldn’t remember ever feeling that way, certainly not at that age.

  “So?” Isabella said. “The bathroom?”

  Elisabeth hadn’t invited her in.

  “Oh!” she said. “Right. It’s down the hall there.”

  Isabella went in and closed the door, and Sam whispered, “I’m sorry. She’s just like that. I can’t control her.”

  “Why are you sorry?” Elisabeth said. “It’s fine.”

  They returned to their spots in the kitchen. Elisabeth pulled her wallet from her purse and handed Sam her week’s pay. Doing so always made her think of how little she’d accomplished, how she didn’t have much to show for those hours of childcare.

  They both acted sheepish during the exchange, every time. Sam didn’t feel like an employee. Giving her that thin stack of bills each Friday was the only reminder that she was.

  Nomi had asked over text if Sam did Gil’s laundry or made baby food.

  It’s part of a na
nny’s job, she wrote.

  Elisabeth replied, I could never ask Sam to do that kind of stuff.

  To which Nomi responded with the eye-roll emoji.

  Nomi had a team of people under her at work. She knew how to be the boss. Elisabeth had never had so much as an assistant. She didn’t even like to be home when the cleaning lady came every other Saturday morning. It felt wrong, drinking coffee in her bathrobe while some woman whose last name she didn’t know scrubbed her toilet. She had hated the way her own mother talked to housekeepers and gardeners and nannies, with that air of superiority.

  In Brooklyn, for years, Elisabeth watched black nannies care for white children and thought there was something problematic about the whole arrangement. She swore she would never take part in it. Much of parenthood was doing, saying, and being things you once swore you’d never do, say, or be. But what Elisabeth had with Sam made her feel above all that.

  Isabella found them in the kitchen. “This neighborhood is adorable,” she said.

  “I know, right?” Sam said. “While we spend our night trying not to get roofied by frat boys dressed as pirates, you’ll be here enjoying all the cute trick-or-treaters.”

  “You make the party sound like so much fun,” Elisabeth said.

  “These things bore me,” Sam said. “And they’re disgusting when you think of it.”

  “Please note: they didn’t bore her when she was unattached and allowed to make out at parties,” Isabella said.

  “What do you mean they’re disgusting?” Elisabeth said.

  Sam sighed. “We follow certain rules—never go to the bathroom without a friend, don’t let your girlfriends leave with anyone if they seem too drunk. Don’t accept a drink that you didn’t see poured.”

  “That seems sensible,” Elisabeth said.

  “I wish instead of all that we refused to go to parties where it’s pretty likely somewhere in the building a girl with an inferior protection plan is getting raped.”

  “Way to suck the fun out of it,” Isabella said.

  “So why do you go?” Elisabeth said.

  “Because if I don’t, this one will give me hell.”

  “She spends most of her free time talking to a boyfriend in a different time zone,” Isabella said. “It’s tragic. This is our senior year.”

  “See what I mean?” Sam said. “Okay, let’s go start the fun.”

  “Stay awhile if you want,” Elisabeth said. “Or do you have an appointment for the nails?”

  “It’s a walk-in place,” Isabella said.

  “How about a glass of wine then?”

  “Sure!” Isabella answered before Sam could say anything.

  Elisabeth tried to read Sam’s expression.

  “Only if you want to,” she said. “Don’t let me keep you.”

  Sam smiled. “A glass of wine sounds great.”

  Elisabeth opened a good bottle of Cabernet that a former coworker of Andrew’s had given him as a farewell gift. She poured three glasses, filling them almost to the top.

  “Cheers,” they said, clinking the glasses together. “Happy Halloween!”

  Isabella took a gulp of wine, then unbuttoned her coat. She was rail thin, but she had a paunch. She looked four or five months pregnant. A beer belly? Elisabeth wondered. She had met Isabella at that bar, briefly, but hadn’t noticed it. She had been sitting down then, though.

  A hard knock at the front door ushered in forty minutes of trick-or-treaters, a blur of kids in costume, trailed by parents, many of them in costume too. After the fifth family in a row dressed in a Star Wars motif, Isabella said what Elisabeth was thinking: “These moms want to show that they’ve still got it, so they go as Princess Leia and make the kids be stormtroopers. Do those kids even know what stormtroopers are?”

  Elisabeth poured more wine and put out a plate of cheese and crackers to counterbalance the candy they’d eaten. Her face seemed to vibrate from the sugar.

  “When I first lived in the city,” she said, “I worked at a women’s magazine. I lived in a fifth-floor walk-up with four roommates and spent my days doing expense reports, but I got to go to Heidi Klum’s Halloween party. My boss was sick, so she gave me her invitation.”

  “Tell me everything,” Isabella said.

  “Heidi was dressed as Lady Godiva. She rode in on a horse.”

  “I hope I have a story as good as that one next Halloween,” Isabella said. “When I’m no longer living here in Boringsville. Or hauling around this gut.” She put both hands on her stomach.

  Elisabeth wasn’t sure what to say.

  “I don’t usually look like this,” Isabella said. “I’m donating my eggs and I’m on all these drugs to make them huge. When I walk, I can feel them swishing around in there. It’s disgusting.”

  Before Elisabeth could formulate a question, Isabella said, “Gotta pee again. BRB,” and was gone.

  Elisabeth looked at Sam. “She’s—”

  “I know,” Sam said. “It’s crazy.”

  “Is she desperate for the cash?”

  “No. She says she’s worried about money, but I have no idea why.”

  “No one ever thinks they have enough money,” Elisabeth said.

  “She has enough. Believe me. Her dad’s the president of a bank or something.”

  “Has anybody tried to talk her out of it?”

  “Once Isabella makes up her mind, you kind of have to let her go and hope she figures it out on her own,” Sam said.

  “She’s giving herself shots every day?”

  “No. I do them.”

  Elisabeth felt herself flash from friend to angry mother. Who would ask a girl this age to sell her eggs? Why had Sam gone along, and never even mentioned it to her?

  When Isabella came back, asking whether they thought Heidi Klum had had work done, Elisabeth said, “Don’t do it.”

  Isabella blinked. “Do what?”

  “Don’t sell your eggs.”

  “I have to. I signed a contract.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No.”

  Whoever had the eggs had the rights. Elisabeth remembered that much from her research. You couldn’t force someone to give you a part of her own body, no matter what she had promised.

  “Last month, I was taking progesterone, estrogen, Gonal-F, Menopur,” Isabella said. “Those are the names of the drugs.”

  “I know,” Elisabeth said. “I did IVF to have Gil.”

  “You did?” Sam said.

  “So you know,” Isabella said. “It was only supposed to take a month. I started in September, but I guess the doctor got the drug combination wrong because there weren’t as many follicles as they were hoping. So this month, they increased the dosages, and boom—I’m huge.”

  “Hyperstimulation,” Elisabeth said. “They gave you too much medication this time.”

  “But everything is looking good,” Isabella said. “I’ll get paid twice what we originally agreed to, since it’s gone on so long. It’s almost over. I’ll do the egg retrieval on Tuesday.”

  “They put you under for that,” Elisabeth said.

  “I know. Thank God.”

  So blasé. Elisabeth wanted to shake her.

  “Have you told your parents?”

  “Of course not.”

  “This is a huge deal,” she said. “You will have a child out there somewhere.”

  “It’s not my child, it’s my egg,” Isabella said, as if Elisabeth had missed something. “And this couple seems adorable. Kim and Tim. Their names rhyme. How cute is that? I want to help them. They deserve it.”

  Elisabeth looked to Sam, but Sam only shrugged.

  “Please think about it,” she said. “You’re going to regret this one day. It’s not worth the money
, I’m telling you.”

  Isabella seemed like the type who could laugh anything off. But just for a moment, Elisabeth thought she saw something cross the girl’s face. An understanding of what she’d said. She hoped she had gotten through.

  “How long did you have to do IVF for?” Sam asked quietly.

  “A year.”

  “Was it awful?”

  “It was both really bad and not that bad,” Elisabeth said. “Those months when it didn’t work after I basically made it my full-time job were awful. I did so many ridiculous things to make it happen.”

  “Like what?” Sam asked.

  On top of all the shots, she had a daily regimen, culled from the advice of doctors, friends, and random women in online forums, of meditation, baby aspirin, iron supplements, bone broth, pomegranate juice, six cups of red raspberry leaf tea, followed by six cups of nettle tea. There was the acupuncturist who took a gentle, spa-like approach to enhancing her fertility. And the one who said the more pain the better, shooting electrical currents into her abdomen through thick needles. At Faye’s urging, on a work trip to Montreal, Elisabeth hiked to the top of Mount Royal to procure oil from Saint Joseph’s Oratory, which she rubbed onto her belly each night, even though she was an atheist.

  She looked at Sam and Isabella, unaware of the desperation that could take hold if you waited too long. How did you tell girls like this that there was something called a vaginal steam and it cost three hundred dollars, which you were beyond willing to pay, in the hopes that it might be the magic bullet? The answer was you didn’t tell them. They weren’t ready for that kind of information.

  Elisabeth had once gone for a Mayan abdominal massage. She was embarrassed by her disappointment upon learning on arrival that the masseuse’s name was Rochelle Moskowitz. For the price, she’d been hoping for an actual Mayan. The massage itself was not at all relaxing. Rochelle was running behind that day, so they started fifteen minutes late. Rochelle instructed Elisabeth to envision a nest of feathers and rocks. But all she could think about was that she was going to be late for dinner with her coworker Pearl.

  When Rochelle Moskowitz said, “Do you want to meet your girlfriend now?” Elisabeth replied, “Yes.” Amazed that this woman had somehow read her mind.